The Museum of the Future

It was after several visits to the
National Gallery in Washington to see the paintings from the Berlin galleries
that WALTER LIPPMAN, made newly aware of the inaccessibility of most great
works of art, reached these conclusions about the museum of the future. This
paper is the substance of an address delivered at the annual meeting of the
American Association of Museums

What I shall talk about in this article defined itself in my mind after
visiting the museum in Pasadena to see once more the Huntington collection, and
after visits to the National Gallery in Washington—first to see the paintings
from the Berlin galleries, and then to see the crowds of people who were
climbing over one another to see the paintings from the Berlin galleries.

There in California were collections of fine pictures, precious books, and
unique manuscripts, which had come finally to rest in a sanctuary as perfect
and as secure as the ingenuity and good will of man can provide. They are in a
building which is fireproof, earthquakeproof, air conditioned. They are guarded
like the children of a king by a corps of doctors, nurses, courtiers, and
secretaries. They live in a place so happily of no importance to any military
strategist that no general staff would waste an atomic bomb on them.

And by contrast, there in Washington were the pictures from the Berlin
galleries, refugees from the retribution Hitler had brought down upon Berlin,
dug up from the salt mine in which they were buried, and now homeless
wanderers—destined to return to the land which could become the vortex of the
most terrible cataclysm in all history.

The contrast is dramatic; and meditating on it, I said to myself that if all
goes well in the best of all possible worlds, the unique and irreplaceable
possessions of civilized men—at least all those that can be moved—will be
preserved against the vicissitudes of nature, and the destructiveness of men,
in sanctuaries like that in California.

And then a disturbing thought occurred to me. The experience of man, and the
creations, inventions, discoveries of men throughout the ages and in an
infinite variety of circumstances, transcend our personal lives and our
immediate interests. This inheritance is worth collecting and preserving and
using—whatever our transient hopes and fears. Without it the life of man
would, as Hobbes said in another connection, be empty, nasty brutish, and
short.

For if there were nothing for the spirit to work upon except its own reactions
to musings upon the immediate moment of time and a small spot of space, the
freedom of the human spirit would be vagrant and trivial. Without the
accumulated achievements of the past to work upon, the freedom of men would be
limited by the necessity of rediscovering and of repeating endlessly that which
has already been discovered and experienced. And since life is short and art is
long, not much would be discovered, and little would be created.

Yet the supply of masterpieces of art and unique objects of great value is
limited, whereas all over the world, in every nation and in every city there is
a rising demand by greater and greater masses of people for access to these
masterpieces and unique objects.

It is evident that there are not enough of them to stock the younger and newer
museums. The epoch of the great private collectors, which began in the
sixteenth century, is quite evidently nearing its end in the twentieth century
The masterpieces of the past which were once owned by private individuals are
passing into the hands of governments and corporate foundations. Except by
military conquest, there is less and less likelihood that they will be
redistributed. They are not for sale, as once they were, because the heirs of
the original collector were not interested in keeping them or were forced to
dispose of them. Broadly speaking, it may be said, therefore, that once
masterpieces and unique objects pass into the possession of existing museums,
they have reached their final resting place and are removed forever from the
market.

Except against the furious destructiveness of modern war, the vandalism of
mobs, and the risks of natural catastrophes, the works which are movable will
have been deposited in museums which are sanctuaries for the preservation of
the relics.

But how, then, are the great masses to be given access to their cultural
inheritance? A few, but only a few, can travel about the world visiting all the
museums making their pilgrimages to the sanctuaries. Only a few museums, here
and there, can have collections which are remotely representative even of the
elements of the great cultural traditions. In the nature of things, the works
they possess are bound to be accidental and arbitrary—to be collections of
bits and pieces—a portrait head from Egypt in Berlin, the Elgin marbles in
London, a Rubens in Cleveland, two dozen English paintings from the eighteenth
century in southern California.

The problem becomes clearer if we compare the visual arts with literature.
Suppose that a lover of literature had to go to London to read Hamlet, to Paris
to read Macbeth, to Rome to read The Tempest, to Boston for some of the
Sonnets, to Chicago for others; suppose he had to go back to London, or Paris,
or Rome, or Boston, every time he wanted to read a work by Shakespeare The
enjoyment and the appreciation of literature would be a problem like that of
the enjoyment and appreciation of the fine arts.

To put the matter this way is to pose the obvious question, which has occurred
to everyone who has thought about the problem. That is whether the unique
objects can be made generally accessible through reproductions. My friend John
Walker, Curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, states that
nearly sixty years ago there was a proposal by one F. W. Smith, which was
seriously considered at the time, to build within the District of Columbia on
an area of sixty-two acres "a wonderful agglomeration of magnificent
edifices...full size models of various monuments of all countries throughout
the ages... and filled with casts and copies of historic objects."

Mr. Walker says that this curious and fantastic project was very nearly
undertaken. No doubt we may be thankful that it was not. But the basic idea
cannot be dismissed: it is one we are compelled to entertain when we face the
fact that the supply of unique objects is so limited and the public demand for
access to them so unlimited.

Only recently Andre Malraux, who probably has never heard of F. W. Smith, said
that "the idea of a democratic culture which seemed vague and suspect in the
nineteenth century has grown clear and valid in the twentieth century because
of the development of the techniques for reproducing works of art."..."Painting
and music," he said, "have at last discovered their printing press."

I wonder whether the directors of museums will not have to come to grips with
the whole complicated question of copies of works of fine art. One can imagine,
I venture to think, that the museum of the future will have two
departments—one the sanctuary where the unique objects, the irreplaceable
relics, are preserved and exhibited for the veneration and the enjoyment of
those who make the pilgrimage; the other department in effect a library for the
student, the scholar, and the amateur, where they can find, as in any library,
collected in one place and readily accessible to them various editions of the
unique objects which are scattered in the sanctuaries all over the world.

It is interesting in this connection to remember that the most famous museum of
ancient times, the Museum of Alexandria, was, so the Encyclopaedia Britannica
says, a great library and home for scholars and that the conception of a museum
as a collection of antiquities is quite modern.

2.

A crucial question, obviously, is how far the technique of reproduction has
been perfected, and in what measure indeed it could be perfected. Any edition
of Shakespeare's plays which has been proofread accurately gives a reader as
good access to Shakespeare's art as if he owned one of the first folios now
deposited in the Folger Library. Is there something about a work of fine art
which can never even in theory be copied? Is the work which the master himself
put his hand to unique in its essence? And if it is, is this uniqueness in fact
aesthetic? Or is it—assuming that an indistinguishable copy could be
made—sentimental and historical?

I suspect that questions like these cannot be answered dogmatically, and that
probably no one should attempt to answer them dogmatically. When Malraux says
that painting has found its printing press, the answer surely is—not yet. Even
an untrained eye can see that the color and texture of paintings are not now
faithfully reproduced. But can one say that if the effort were made to
reproduce them faithfully, that if the research were promoted and endowed,
eventually modern technology could not arrive at the equivalent of the printing
press?

In the meantime, and as an inducement to remain open-minded, it may be useful
to analyze the idea of the unique object, attempting to isolate that which is
aesthetic from that which is sentimental, historical, and, if I may say so,
monopolistic.

It is an interesting exercise in criticism to inquire into the purely aesthetic
reaction which the one and only original is uniquely able to produce. I think
anyone who visited the National Gallery in London last season and saw Philip
Hendy's exhibit of cleaned and uncleaned pictures must have come away from it
not quite so clear as he once was; no longer naively certain that he had been
reacting aesthetically to the original work of the master rather than to a
joint and changing product in which the first artist had collaborated with time
and circumstances across the centuries.

But of all the many facets of this problem of the work of art as a unique
object, there is one which bears especially upon the theme that I have been
discussing. Not all the paintings which are exhibited in museums are
indubitably the original work of a surely identified artist. This fact has
given rise to a fascinating profession—that of the connoisseurs who determine
the attributions and perform in the world of art the functions of Sherlock
Holmes and J. Edgar Hoover.

Theirs is, I have always thought, an enviable profession, full of mystery and
romance. The innocent child who has been disowned and forgotten is recognized
at last as the true prince of the realm, and the villainous pretender is cast
into outer darkness and stored in the cellar. I look upon the great man-hunts
of the connoisseurs as a preview of how we shall pass the time in the brave new
world of the future when all the problems of war and poverty and class and
caste have been solved, and we need thrillers—not as now to put us to sleep
but to keep us awake.

The existence among us of these aesthetic sleuths is good evidence, I think,
that the enjoyment of art is not altogether a simple, intuitive reaction in the
presence of a masterpiece. If it were, what difference did it make that the
alleged Vermeer in Rotterdam, which was so greatly enjoyed by lovers of
Vermeer, was proved to have been the work of a modern forger? If all that
matters is the purely aesthetic effect, then what is the purpose of the whole
apparatus of scholarship, the search of the documents, the X-rays, and the
chemical tests?

Does not our concern with attribution indicate that for modern men aesthetic
enjoyment is almost inseparable from knowledge, that feeling alone does not
satisfy us, but needs the support of understanding—so that if I may take the
liberty of paraphrasing Plotinus, our passions may be intellectual and our
intellects passionate? I think it does, and that is one more reason, and
perhaps the most conclusive of all, why modern museums can no longer be, as
they were a generation ago, places where original works are preserved and
exhibited—why they are becoming also libraries and laboratories of research
and education.

For the unique objects which any one museum can possess, however fine each of
them may be, are incapable of satisfying the need to understand, the need to
see not only the unique object, as such, in isolation, but to see it in the
context of the whole work of the artist and of his school and of his period and
of his culture. Without the context, which depends on the apparatus of
knowledge, aesthetic enjoyment—because of the arbitrary and random scattering
of works of art all over the world—would be mere eclecticism, the expenditure
of emotion on a series of disconnected, unrelated, and inherently meaningless
objects. For only knowledge can impose order and intelligibility upon the
feelings and passions, which, if they are excited capriciously can never be
satisfied, and become diseased. Thus it is only by the cultivation of the
knowledge of the comparative history of art that modern men, exposed as they
are to odd collections of bits and pieces of the creative world of all the
ages, can begin to cope with the flux and the chaos of modernity.